Fralic: There are some things worth treasuring

That includes heritage homes and venerable institutions such as daily newspapers, both of which have withstood the test of time

Shelley Fralic values heritage, including her 1912-vintage home.

More than 1,500 people dropped by my house last Sunday, and let me tell you there’s nothing like a passel of strangers on the doorstep to get you to clean behind the stove.

They proved to be an unfailingly gracious and polite lot, however, all ticket-holders in the 33rd annual New Westminster Heritage Home Tour & Tea, and mine was one of 12 homes they explored throughout the day, along with a lovely old church and our local museum.

What struck me, as they wandered about taking photos and fondling the pocket doors, was the question they kept asking me: “Why do you do this?”

That’s an easy one to answer. I do it, and have done it five times in the past 24 years, because I am the caretaker of a home that has stood a century, and because I feel compelled to share its charms to remind our increasingly disposable society that some things are worth preserving, that there is value in that which has stood the test of time, that to wander through my old home is to appreciate the life and times of the four families that have lived in it, to know that it has outlasted world wars and withering weather along with social, economic and technological tumult like no other time in history.

My house is a living book, built on a legacy of ancient wood and untold memories.

It is a modest place, constructed in 1912 on a quiet street looking down the hill to the Fraser River. It is one of three in a row celebrating their centenary on our block this year, the still-standing handiwork of two builders known as McCullough and Gostick, craftsmen who favoured spar-varnished Douglas fir trim and stained-glass piano windows.

I bought the house in 1988, in a time when many similar homes in the area were being bulldozed to make way for nondescript builders’ boxes designed to cover every allowable inch of land at the lowest possible cost.

The heritage society wanted to change attitudes so these historic homes would be saved, and its popular home tour has done just that, turning these one-time teardowns into civic treasures that now fetch top dollar despite their shortcomings (my house has no insulation and, wait for it, just one bathroom, but its original details are much coveted).

While greeting all those folks last weekend, I felt proud, and silently rejoiced over that change in attitude, and then along came Monday and, once again, I was left wondering how it is that society can place so little value on the venerable.

The news out of Toronto was grim, as it has been for much of the past decade, arriving in yet another employee email from Postmedia, the national media company that owns my newspaper — the other 100-year-old treasure in my life.

Times continue to be tough for our business. Ad revenues for the print product are down, and have yet to be replaced by equivalent revenue on our well-read websites. I get it. News online is fast and free.

Except it’s not. To some degree, we have been the architects of our own fate, collectively failing to remind our readers that there is a real cost attached to all those photo galleries and breaking news links on their hand-helds. We have neglected to educate a new generation of readers (and some old ones, too) that information, especially respected, reliable information, doesn’t just appear like some kind of online magic, and so they don’t make the link between The Sun’s website content and the experienced journalists back in the newsroom who research, write and edit those stories.

We haven’t done a good enough job these past few years in selling ourselves, in telegraphing the value of what we do, so busy have we been getting lost in the flotsam and jetsam of the tech thrust.

We’re not alone in this, of course. Every major daily newspaper in North America is facing the same conundrum — how to get online users to pay for, and advertise in, the same product they once paid for, and advertised in.

That we — and so many other newspapers, including the vaunted New York Times — decided to give our goods away a decade ago, in our blind rush to join the Internet slipstream, has surely come back to haunt us. Perhaps we might have heeded the old saw that no one buys the cow when the milk is free, but we didn’t, and today the Times and other newspapers, including ours, are looking to Internet paywalls to stem the bleeding.

The challenge, and it’s a big one, will be convincing online readers to pay for something they have been getting for nothing.

And, yet, The Vancouver Sun hasn’t really changed. It still represents credibility and integrity. It still requires the work of experienced reporters, and a costly publishing infrastructure. It still offers Metro Vancouver a news product that no one else does: unique opinion, analysis, editorials, investigative news, cartoonists, incomparable columnists like Vaughn Palmer and Pete McMartin, and a skilful ability to take mountains of information and turn it into a compelling, informative and entertaining daily package.

The questions we might be asking our online readers, and those who no longer care to invest in the print version, are these: How can we, as an information-hungry culture, think that a newspaper that has chronicled and reflected its community, and its readers, for 100 years — a newspaper they once respectfully paid for — no longer have value?